Burmese Lessons

by Karen Connelly

  Past a thick stand of bamboo, we come upon three children, frozen by our approach, each one standing on a great round rock above the small pool of water. Two boys and a girl, they are gleaming wet, their threadbare underwear hanging off their little round butts. To me they are like a sweet Greek-Asian tableau: satyrs with chocolate skin, wood nymphs cavorting in the jungle. They stare from me to Maung, back to me again. Their gazes take in our joined hands, which allow them to understand everything instantaneously. The girl, whose height suggests that she is the eldest, formally greets us. One after the other, the two boys yell, “Hla-deh!” like a war cry, and leap into the waiting pool of green water.

  Hla-deh. That deep, soft word. My first. More than a year later, I know that in Burmese beautiful is a verb, not an adjective. Maung and I immediately drop hands, smile at the kids. Then we wave goodbye. He can’t be away too long. The path narrows again; he walks in front. “The languages are so different,” I observe, knowing that he is not usually interested in this sort of thing. “In Burmese, to be beautiful is an act. In English, it describes a state.”

  But he surprises me. “That is why, in Burma, and in Burmese, a woman doesn’t have to be so pretty to be beautiful. The real beautiful is not the face, not the body. It happens in the heart.”

  I suspect that he’s practicing some good old Western irony on me. But when I touch his shoulder to make him turn around his face is grave. We stare at each other for a few seconds. He steps close to me, touches his lips to my lips. Breathes “I love you” into my slightly open mouth. Then he turns away again. We keep walking.

  Returning to the camp, Maung and I approach a hut where two of last night’s yodeling guerrilla soldiers on leave are staying. We see that they’re busy with lunch, bent over their enameled Chinese bowls like old men, clawed fingers scooping rice into their mouths. This visceral, unapologetic way of eating brings to mind my friend Barba Andreas, a seventy-five-year-old Greek shepherd whose olive grove borders mine. Like these skinny guerillas, Barba Andreas always eats as if he were starving. It’s a habit learned from a time when he was hungry, when the young, and old, and unlucky did starve in Greece, during the Second World War, after the Germans stripped the land of food for their troops.

  There’s another reason that one of the men reminds me of the shepherd, though I’m not sure what it is. I look at his thick black hair; Andreas’s head is pure white now. When Maung and I stop in front of the small veranda, the dark little man looks up from his bowl and asks us the polite question of greeting, “Have you eaten rice?”

  Then I understand. He has a big, near-handlebar mustache very similar to Andreas’s—though black and fringed here and there with grains of rice. On a Southeast Asian man, this abundant growth of facial hair is striking. He also wears a full beard. Maung introduces me as Ma Yee Yee Cho.

  The mustachioed man puts his hand over his heart and sighs. “Pleased to meet you. Sweet to meet you! My name is Sparrow. I am little bird. I love to sing.” He starts collecting the rice from his mustache with his tongue and his lower teeth. I smile inwardly: Andreas does the same thing. How curious to be the connective tissue between the most distant, most unlikely relations.

  Sparrow asks his companion if he has finished eating from the communal plate of food. Yes, the man replies. There is nothing left but fish bones. Sparrow picks up the deep-fried fish head with his fingers and carefully fits it into his mouth. One cheek bulges out in a fish-nosed triangle as he chews. Stretched lips, stretched mustache, stretched face. He ramps up the absurdity by batting his eyelashes like Betty Boop.

  A Karen man stops to say hello to Maung and the two guerrillas. Then a young woman joins us, cradling her woven shoulder bag to her stomach. “What’s inside?” Maung asks. She holds the mouth of the bag open and we take turns peering down the rabbit hole at a sleeping, ears-back white bunny. “Is something wrong with it?”

  Maung translates her answer. It’s the second smallest of the litter, but the runt died and its territorial brothers and sisters seem to have taken a dislike to this one. They won’t let it near the doe to drink any more milk. “But with some help it should be fine. The litter is already eating solid food.”

  Sparrow, finished with the fish head, sticks his hand into the bag and pulls the creature out. We exclaim at how cute it is. Sparrow licks his lips and belches. We laugh indulgently, though the woman barely hides her irritation. He lifts the white, soft-furred creature up close to his thick mustache. “Hello, Mr. Rabbit. I am Mr. Sparrow. We live together in the jungle and we are brothers. Mr. Sparrow is very hungry.” The young woman mutters something under her breath. Sparrow looks up, black-water eyes shining with innocence. “What?” The young woman takes the bunny from him.

  Five minutes later, while Maung and the Karen man are talking on the veranda, Sparrow says to me, “Give me your hand.” He once was a fortune-teller who read palms at the Sule Pagoda in Rangoon. I don’t ask him about his long journey from there to here. Nor will I ask the other man how he lost the thumb and index finger of his right hand. The closed-over wound is a purple, C-shaped line of bumps and clumps, suggesting a surgery that was at best utilitarian. The shark bite of shrapnel. Or a land mine that mostly missed. I don’t want to ask either of these men depressing questions. Let them take their brief vacation from active combat. Let them drink themselves into as sweet an oblivion as they can manage on Karen moonshine. Maybe it’ll work for them better than it worked for me.

  I give Sparrow my hand. He closes his eyes and begins to massage my palm. His brown thumbs knead the pads of flesh that meet to form the love line and the fortune line. His nails are long, broken, black with dirt. Thirty seconds pass. Forty. After a minute has gone by, I ask, “What do you see?”

  “Dark.”

  I guess that’s what you get when you’re not a paying customer. “Just darkness? Are you joking?”

  His head is canted back, suggesting rapture. He’s missing a couple of molars. “Ma Yee Yee Cho, I not joking. My eyes closed. All dark. Can’t see nothing. But I feel. I feel! You have so soft hand.” His fingers massage in rhythm to his singsong words. “I like very much. Lovely hand.” Eyes still closed, he lifts his eyebrows and gasps audibly—whether in mock or actual ecstasy it’s hard to tell. How long has it been since he touched a woman?

  Maung laughs and gives him a good shove in the shoulder. Sparrow squeezes my hand before he releases it and falls over sideways, trilling drunken laughter. This morning I saw satyrs. And here is Pan, their love-starved older brother, using humor to manage his miserable change in status from woodland god to guerrilla soldier.

  • • •

  Until now, most of the ABSDF and DPNS members I know have had a level of rank, education, or skill that has brought them out of the jungle for protracted periods of time. Those who live in the towns and cities, like Maung and his closest men, are too well padded with flesh to be mistaken for working soldiers. Cheap Thai noodles and deep-fried snacks have served them well. Before we left Mae Sarieng, I asked one of these officers, who is almost chubby, if he was worried about getting fat. He shrugged. “Since living in camp, the only thing I worry about is being hungry all the time.”

  I’ve seen documentary footage of Maung taken when he still lived fulltime in the jungle. At first I didn’t recognize him; I knew him only through the steady baritone of his voice. But for his somber, intelligent expression, he resembled a malnourished teenage runaway. His limbs and neck were elongated—an optical illusion arranged by the same thinness that made his eyes seem so large. The young men and women posed with machine guns in their arms resembled one another: skinny, displaced, stunned. And heartrendingly brave.

  But those early images of Maung and his student comrades—many of them taken by Charlie—have not prepared me for the guerrillas I meet here at headquarters camp. In these men, the early malaria and malnourishment of 1988 and 1989 have been multiplied to the power of ten: a decade of deprivation. Sparrow’s mustache and beard are disguises that giv
e his face substance but cannot hide the fact that the world is in close contact with his skeleton. The skin is thin, the muscles long and beaten out, like scalloped meat. There is no reserve of flesh, not the finest marbling of fat. He has become his namesake, the little bird as light as a handful of feathers.

  I meet him again the next night, along with half a dozen other men on leave, all front-liners. Maung and a few other people are here, too, men and two other women, which is a blessing. Sometimes, when men without women suddenly come into contact with one female of the species, the air feels charged. With just a couple of other women here, that tension dissipates. At ease with one another, in a good mood, we sit around a fire. Maung and two of the guerrillas take turns playing a warped guitar. It looks beat-up enough to be the same instrument he played the night I met him. But the A string doesn’t break.

  One of the front-liners, sick with malaria, is wrapped and shivering in a gray blanket. He laughs at Sparrow’s rapid-fire jokes; he chats with his fellows. Yet he could easily play the part of a zombie in a Hollywood film—his cheekbones jut out, eyeholes burn under a pronounced forehead, teeth look large for his mouth. Suddenly declaring that he’s very hot, he throws the blanket off his shoulders. The expensive long-sleeved dress shirt he’s wearing is a gift I gave to Maung before he went to America. I feel insulted for just a moment. Or two. Obviously the man needs the shirt more than Maung does. The expense of it, here, is revealed as a waste of money. If only it were medicine. If only he could eat the excellent cotton.

  When I quietly comment on the soldier’s unhealthy pallor, Maung says, “Maybe he’ll stay in camp longer than the others.” But, maybe, in a week, he’ll go back to his rocket launcher. Maung’s head is angled down, but his eyes look up at me sheepishly. “I’m sorry about the shirt. I wanted to give him something. I like to give the men gifts.”

  “It’s okay.” I would like to give them something myself, say, twenty pounds of fat. I am thinner than I’ve ever been, but I still feel plump beside these war-whittled men. I don’t know if Maung also feels embarrassed by his sleek-seal health. Does he make pacts with himself, when he goes back to the city, to not eat so much curry? Or does he, too, eat only with the memory of the malnourishment he has already experienced?

  For the past five minutes, Sparrow has been busy fashioning a stick into a skewer. Through the fire, I watch his stained hands do their work, wielding the sharp knife dexterously. His skinny body hunches over. His energy channels down his arms, pours into his fingers. Once again I think of Andreas, whose powerful, slow-moving hands are the callused record of his life. Sparrow’s hands are that, too, but speedy, twisting and tearing like weasels. He scrapes down two knots and then further sharpens the point of the switch.

  Beside him is a bowl I haven’t noticed, and in the bowl is a plastic bag, from which he withdraws a glistening red slab. In the wavering light, I can’t make out any limbs, just a small head. It might be a bird, but it looks too meaty. Is it … the fetus of a larger animal? As I suck in a shocked breath, the fire crackles and leaps. Maybe it’s not a fetus; it’s just a little dead animal. He pokes the stick through its anus, up through its center, and out through its throat. The little head swings down. Then he centers the skinned animal in the hot tremble over the fire.

  What a small snack for this large company. We’ve all had dinner, but the roasting flesh reawakens appetites. I hope he and his sick comrade eat the animal, just the two of them, but I know that once the morsel is cooked the stick will be passed around, a bite offered to everyone. I venture a question in Burmese. “Is it a bird?” I ask this first because I know the word for bird.

  His eyes glitter in my direction. Sparrow is one of those people who, with a glance, makes you aware of both how much you don’t know and how amusing your ignorance is. Rather than being insulted, you can’t help smiling with him. I lean away from the fire to enter directly the small, bright province of his eyes.

  “It is not a bird,” he answers in the voice of a riddle-teller. “I would not eat my own brother.” Everyone laughs.

  “Is it a rat?”

  “It is not a rat.” His mustache lengthens with his smile.

  “Is it a …?” My vocabulary remains paltry. How do you say “guinea pig”?

  Sparrow flips his heavy mat of hair off his face and grins lecherously. He is drunk again; I don’t hold it against him. “Ya-ba-deh, Ma Yee Yee Cho.” Never mind. “It is meat. Meat!”

  We stare at the sizzling animal. It will be ready soon. I feel grateful that I’ve forgotten the word for bunny.

  CHAPTER 44

  CHASM

  We sit on the small veranda of a hut close to the war office. Two men are inside working. I’ve come up to see Maung, who isn’t feeling well. “Diarrhea,” he says with a sigh.

  “A Greek word.”

  “Another one? Really?”

  “From the verb ‘to flow.’”

  “Ah. Right.”

  “Well, I envy you. I wish I had diarrhea. I haven’t shat in twelve days.”

  “That many? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I did tell you.”

  “The special syrup never helped?”

  “Maung, I told you, I drank the whole bottle. Nothing happened. Don’t you remember?”

  “You will get sick if you don’t shit.”

  “I feel sick.” I’m not in the best of moods this morning. “I’m pretty sure I have cystitis, too. Even peeing is difficult.”

  While fiddling with his not quite wrapped areca nut on the table, he mulls over this new information. “It’s from the stream, no?”

  “I suppose.” He smiles with such idiotic pride—why, I have no idea—that I have to resist the urge to slug him. “It’s not funny.”

  “I agree, I agree. It’s bad for your kidneys.”

  “Which? Constipation or the bladder infection?”

  “Both. Some antibiotics will clear up the cystitis. But you really have to shit.”

  “It’s not like I don’t try! I try every day. It’s not easy to spend half an hour in the latrine down there, hoping for the best.” The outhouse close to my hut is not nearly as high-tech and tidy as the one close to the war office. I sometimes walk ten minutes up the mountain to make my great attempt on the porcelain squat toilet set in cement—the equivalent of luxury—but mostly I can’t be bothered. I brave the smelly, maggoty depths; I’m used to them now. “The only thing I’ve got for all my efforts is hemorrhoids. At least, I think they’re hemorrhoids.”

  He nods thoughtfully and fits the betel-wrapped areca nut into his cheek, which distorts his answer. “Ung. We au haff hemorrhoids. Fac of jungle liffing.”

  I laugh at the philosophical tone, apparent despite the wad in his cheek. He shrugs. I put my tea down on the narrow table in front of us. He reaches out and brushes my fingers. “Lovely hand,” he says, imitating Sparrow. I laugh again.

  I look at the little box of areca and betel paraphernalia. “Maybe I should try betel nut for the constipation. One of the women at the stream was saying it might work. It’s a stimulant.”

  “Really? I’ve never heard of it being used to treat constipation. Maybe you should drink a strong coffee and smoke a big cheroot. That usually works for me.”

  He’s about to laugh but winces instead, then grimaces, as though the skin of his face has been yanked from the inside. His color goes. Before my eyes, his skin turns gray-brown. He’s no longer looking at me, but down the hill. “I have to go to the toilet. Excuse me.” He stands, quickly reknots his longyi, and stumbles to the path.

  A few minutes later, one of the officers comes out of the hut, bleary-eyed, blinking against the daylight. He pours a cup of tea from the aluminum pot, looks at the areca nuts, and says, “You chewing betel now?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  We talk about what is worse for your health: chewing betel or smoking cheroots. Neither, apparently. “Cheroots are not bad like cigarettes, and chewing betel is good for you. It m
akes you strong. On long marches we all chew betel.” But he dislikes the peppery, bitter taste of it. “Here, this is a very nice cheroot, try.”

  He hands me a newly lit khaki-green cigar. I inhale, exhale, and almost fall off my chair from the head rush.

  “Very good, no?”

  “Strong.”

  My stomach flips over, gurgles. Maybe I should try cheroots. I look down at the latrine. “Maung’s been in the toilet for a while.”

  “Don’t worry, he will come back soon.” I can hear the amusement in his voice, and imagine his thoughts. She’s so lovesick she can’t even let the man take a dump.

  I follow his gaze away from the outhouse, farther down the trail into the valley, scattered with huts and communal gardens. The fresh hours are almost finished. Soon the day’s heat will settle into the mountainside. We keep talking, but I mostly nod and watch the outhouse door. How long has Maung been in there? Fifteen minutes? “I think you better go check the latrine. He wasn’t feeling well.” I stand up. If he doesn’t go, I will.

  “Okay, okay,” he responds. It takes a minute for him to walk down the slope to the little building. He taps lightly on the door. Then knocks properly. No response. His face flashes in my direction as he pulls open the door. He shouts.

  The other officer inside the hut emerges and runs down the path. Maung has passed out. It’s a struggle for the two of them to get him out of the latrine. The first man runs back up to the hut and radios for help.

  I try to stay out of the way. There are too many of us inside the little hut, but I don’t want to leave him. Men talk among themselves as I watch Maung’s sweating face. His eyelids lift; I think he’s waking up, but it’s just that his head is sliding back over the rolled towel. One of the men shifts Maung’s body rather roughly, to make his eyes close again. How can someone get so sick so quickly? Is there no medic? Can’t anyone check him? I look around me, asking questions into the air. Vomiting, diarrhea, fever, unconsciousness. Is it dysentery?